Michael Gray
@1michaelgray1
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The pioneer of Dylan Studies; speaker, writer, critic, '60s student, living EU. Love music, books, dogs. Hire me to lecture: I'm value for money.
Joined June 2010
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@KonFident77
@battaraaf
Resorting to violence:
Men 98%
Women 2%
Paid more by gender:
Men 95%
Women 5%
Artists paid attention thru history by gender:
Men 99%
Women 1%
Main carers of children:
Men 9%
Women 91%
Refuges for domestic violence victims:
Men 0%
Women 100%
Owed maintenance:
Men 1%
Women 99%
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Joni very brilliant here:
Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and friends at Gordon Lightfoot's home in Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood in 1975.
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Yesterday in 1967 I opened (and ran) one of the first headshops in the north of England: Pitville Circus, in Monkgate, York. From the moment it was available one of our best selling items was this poster by Martin Sharp.
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#BobDylan
can still surprise. Last night he did a 3-song set at Farm Aid 2023, on electric guitar (!), singing Maggie's Farm, Positively 4th Street and Ballad of a Thin Man. Not great but very welcome; 4th St very foreshortened but Thin Man pretty good:
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#neatanniversaries
#50years
My first book was published 50 years ago today!
SONG & DANCE MAN: The Art Of Bob Dylan,
1st edition hardback, London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 20 November 1972!
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It's almost 28 years since I was commissioned by the Guardian to write Jerry Lee Lewis's obituary. He's still alive.
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#neatanniversaries
55 years ago yesterday, I chatted with Jimi Hendrix for about 25 minutes. Mostly about our love of Bob Dylan's work. 1967 was a great year to be young...
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Brilliant, elegant hound.
The nosiest of neighbours will go to almost any lengths to see what's going on on the other side of the wall.
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Listening to Dylan's 'Mississippi' a lot lately ("Love and Theft" version, and Rab Noakes's at Celtic Connections). It's always been a favourite from a favourite album, but I'm struck anew by the Dylanesque genius of "You can always come back but you can't come back all the way."
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Yes, insanely feeble response from the Democrats. Very alarming. Ditto the absence of comments from other supposedly democratic governments.
The transcript of the latest
@gaslitnation
episode, on US officials trying to memory-hole an attempted coup, is out:
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The new leg of
#BobDylan
's R&RW tour opens tonight (in Spokane WA). I'm *very* curious to learn how the set might have changed since the previous leg.
And talking of legs:
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Buddy Holly was 22 when he died. He died 65 years ago yesterday. His value is still significant.
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7pm UK time tonight, Sky Arts TV is again showing
#BobDylan
: The Other Side of the Mirror -- Live at Newport, capturing his different performances, including extensive footage from his "going electric" appearance performance of 1965.
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My obituary for Don Everly is now up online in the Guardian, and will be in the print edition tomorrow:
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15 years ago today I was told that my "Bob Dylan Encyclopedia" had been awarded the International Association of Music Libraries prize, the C.B. Oldman Prize, for the year's outstanding work of reference and research (beating shortlisted studies of two classical composers).
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Today in 1999, my 900+ page "Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan" was UK pub'd. Today in 2023 the final volume of the new 3-vol edition has come! Published by FM Press, NYC, all on sale now.
Vol.1: 979-8-9882887-0-1
Vol.2: 979-8-9882887-1-8
Vol.3: 979-8-9882887-2-5
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My view of "Love and Theft" has remained largely unchanged; that is, I think it the only truly *great*
#BobDylan
album of C21, so I was thrilled to be able to hear a few outtakes from it earlier this year. Here are a couple of especially beguiling lyric changes I heard sung:
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Finally! Here's the cover of my forthcoming book. Info next week on publisher, price & advance-ordering. Have a good weekend and thanks for all the enthusiasm you've shown for this book already:
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We are further away from Highway 61 Revisited than it was from the start of the 1st World War.
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First impression: This is the most surprising, and the best, of all the R&RW Tour's covers. Such heartfelt expressive fondness, faithfully done - yet at the same time he somehow makes it sound like a Dylan song. And he's in good voice.
Bob Dylan — Into The Mystic (song by Van Morrison). Alicante, Spain. 15 June, 2023. Stereo recording.
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Greeting me on arrival at the airport in Tulsa yesterday:
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23 YEARS AGO TODAY, "Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan" was first published in the United States. Later this year, I may have news of it coming back into print😎...
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Morning all. I'm, er, 75 today. Rather a long time since this Japanese hardback of Song & Dance Man was published on my 27th birthday...
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#neatanniversaries
60 years ago y'day, Buddy Holly played almost his last gig: at the Armory in Duluth MN, watched by, among others, Bobby Zimmerman. (The photo is from that night [c/o a Facebook posting by Andrea Orlandi].)
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This just made my wife, the brilliant vegetarian food writer & cook
@sarahbeattiegra
, laugh & laugh & laugh. Then she looked at it again and laughedall over again:
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From the great 'Mississippi', on Dylan's best C21 album, "Love and Theft".
"Well the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way."
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Beautiful slice of
#BobDylan
in London 1995, long around in audio but a delight, now, to see on video. Find a tranquil time to play it; it'll reward your giving it the attention it deserves (specially on headphones). Some nice electric guitar from Bob too
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Glad to say Volume 2 has arrived! New paperback of Song & Dance Man 50th Anniversary Series Vol.2: 'Yonder Comes Sin', on Dylan's gospel period and his 1980s work; ISBN 979-8-9882887-1-8
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MORE NEWS on my forthcoming book about
#BobDylan
's work. It's a selection of essays & other pieces written over almost 55 years: beginning w work of mine done 5 years before the first "Song & Dance Man". It ends with over 24,000 words on "Rough & Rowdy Ways". Full cover tomorrow.
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On at 9.20 UK time tonight: "Bob Dylan: Odds and Ends", Sky Arts TV: a two-hour film composed of archival interviews, promotional videos and documentary shorts, directed by John Hillcoat & Jennifer LeBeau (2021)
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Blind Willie McTell? Up To Me? Hero Blues? Tell Me?...
...All or none of the above?
Find out at 8 30pm Tuesday Jan 16th at Green Note, Camden Parkway, North London: "Abandoned Love:
#BobDylan
's Greatest Rejected Album Tracks": talk with surprising audio c/o Michael Gray
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This live version from two nights ago demands close attention - and received close attention from Bob; it seems absolutely magical that he should be up there able to do this. Affecting (and for me, more so than the album version):
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The very first edition of "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan" was published 51 years ago today.
It was the hardback published in London by the now non-extant but then mainstream Hart-Davis-McGibbon. I was 26. Bob was 31.
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Yes, but is there any more Nigel?
We've got another hour of gorgeous flowers and summer sunshine heading your way this evening as we pick some of our favourite moments from 2020. See you at the slightly later time of 8.10pm on
@BBCTwo
😎🌹🌿
#GardenersWorld
#FlowersOnFriday
#FridayFeeling
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I know a lot of my Twitterites want me to stick to matters
#BobDylan
. But the UK is being raped by its own government, and each day things are too gruesome for silence, even from a voice as powerless as mine.
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While there is Twitter, I'm staying on it. I like it so much more than Facebook or Instagram. If it vanishes, I'm unsure where to go instead. Meanwhile thank you to all who commune with me.
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25 years ago today, I finished writing "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan": 630,000 words (including footnotes). Cassell Academic turned it around fast, publishing the UK 1st edition hardback before the end of the year.
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Glad to see my obituary for Little Richard will be in the print edition of the Guardian tomorrow and is up online now:
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"Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe"
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The most exciting Dylan track I've heard in years (and a great video). The voice so alive and the song such a perfect example of how an artist must have absolute mastery of a medium before triumphing by breaking its rules. What a song! Ditto the solo take.
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Delighted that after over 10 yrs out of print Song & Dance Man is back, split into 3 manageable-sized volumes instead of a 900+ page whopper. Volume 1 can be ordered now; Vols 2 & 3 are coming later in the year. Paperback & Kindle.
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This might be the very best song performance of the whole R&RW tour - a really brilliant Crossing the Rubicon from Grand Rapids Michigan two nights ago (14 Oc):
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#neatanniversaries
#BobDylan
#IWasThere
50 years ago tonight, Dylan headlined at the 2nd Isle of Wight Festival. Here's his lovely performance of 'I Threw It All Away' from that night.
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This Every Grain Of Sand, from this March 18, is an especially good one (and a new arrangement, and two harp solos). I wish I had been there, close to the front, for this:
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Monty
@TheMontyDon
, beware the ides of Nigel
(with apologies to cartoonist for lack of namecheck):
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#neatanniversaries
10 yrs ago today, Bob Dylan mingled unnoticed w Beatle fans on a minibus trip to John Lennon's childhood home. He was one of 14 people to examine photos & documents in the National Trust home. Dylan, on a tour day off, paid £16 for the visit to the 1940s house.
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One ancient
#BobDylan
afficionado who ought to know better, riding on a luge in SW France yesterday:
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#neatanniversaries
My "Bob Dylan Encyclopedia" was 1st published in the UK and Europe 15 years ago today.
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Perhaps surprisingly, Morrissey's cover album includes
#BobDylan
's most radical left-wing political song, Only A Pawn In Their Game - and I'm truly impressed by how he's treated it: one of the best Bob covers I've ever heard.
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21 TODAY! This study of
#BobDylan
's work was 1st published 21 yrs ago today, by Cassell Academic UK. It took most of the 90s to write, mainly because over 90% was done before we had internet. It was only possible thanks t partner/wife
@sarahbeattiegra
& forbearing children & dogs
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NEW EARLIEST BOB DYLAN RECORDING!
We thought the earliest recording was from 1958? Wrong! A tape has reportedly emerged from 1954! From two days before he turned 13! Even in this photo of him he's 2 years older than this newfoundtape...Here's the story:
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On BBC2 at 9pm, The Everly Brothers: Songs of Innocence & Experience, an Arena documentary. My TV guide says this is new, though I remember just such an Arena doc on the Everlys some years ago. Anyway tonight it's followed by re-showing their fairly magical 1983 Reunion Concert.
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Happy to have at last my much-delayed copy of the weighty paperback "New Approaches to Bob Dylan" (about 2 months after the digital edition arrived). It collects essay versions of papers delivered at the University of Southern Denmark Dylan Conference - including mine...
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Just a reminder of something I'm sure you've seen before, but I hadn't, and it popped up on Facebook y'day and I liked it
@TreeHouseBkshop
:
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#21Today
The first US edition of Song & Dance Man III.
I take this opportunity to say that I have a new book on Dylan's work coming out later this spring - and it will include my long essay on "Rough & Rowdy Ways". More info soon!
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I created an Index for this book. It has 1,384 entries. Of course there should have been one in the back of the book but there isn't. You can get a PDF of mine here:
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Real Bob Dylan. So alive, so energetic yet so cool. That voice - that *tone* of voice! Those rhymes! That mesmerising looseness of structure… you have to have real mastery of song to break its rules like this:
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For those with UK television channels: 7pm tonight Sky Arts is showing the
#BobDylan
30th Anniversary Concert, and then Bob Dylan: Odds and Ends...
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A reminder of the grooviness of Tulsa OK airport this year:
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So underrated: it gets shoved aside by love for Freewheelin', but I played it recently, marvelling at that *great* run of tracks from One Too Many Mornings thru North Country Blues, Only A Pawn In Their Game, Boots Of Spanish Leather & When The Ship Comes In to Hattie Carroll.
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Pleased but surprised by a very possibly credible rumour that
#BobDylan
might tour in the UK this autumn
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In May 1978, while head of press at UA Records (London), I accompanied a planeload of music journos to Iceland to see the Stranglers (a promo for their 3rd album). One of the music-paper photographers was Jill Furmanovsky. I took this photo of her:
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This is gorgeous. Such delicate singing, and maintained even though at Verse 1 end the crowd's whooping is so loud. More impassioned towards the end, but still a concentrated, controlled performance: and yes, for once he sings the T.S. Eliot verse!
1995 was a good Bob year.
#BobDylanOnThisDay
Desolation Row
Bethlehem
13 12 1995
Note. Dylan rarely sings the penultimate verse of Desolation Row ("Praise be to Nero's Neptune …") but here it is!
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Blind Willie McTell died in obscurity 62 years ago today (1959), just before he would have been rediscovered in the Folk Revival boom in Greenwich Village etc. For more on Willie & on my biography of him, see
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#neatanniversaries
Dylan's "Oh Mercy" album is 30 years old today. It was "accessible, authoritative and substantial. Attentively written, vocally distinctive, musically warm and produced with uncompromising professionalism... [a] cohesive whole..." [Bob Dylan Encyclopedia]
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She should have been braver and sung the Bob song anyway - but the audience response was a disgrace, and clear proof that it wasn't a Bob crowd: just people who'd come to tick some stars off their bucket list. Dreadful.
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And his most radical political song.
What a Singer! What a Songwriter - at 22!
Bob Dylan - Only a Pawn in Their Game
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HAPPY 79th BIRTHDAY BOB DYLAN!
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What Dylan line do you find yourself saying to your dog? Mine is "Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall".
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A US friend's report on
#BobDylan
's Houston show last night: "He was incredibly animated. In Jerry Lee Lewis mode at the electric piano [and] posing for photos at show's end. It was really a very different Bob. We loved it even if we're still not sure what to make of it."
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#neatanniversaries
This 2nd edition of my book (with its title and sub-title reversed) was published FORTY years ago yesterday, by Hamlyns UK:
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In case you're interested and haven't yet seen it, here is a rather brilliant (and beautifully timed) 17-minute film set to
#BobDylan
's
#MurderMostFoul
:
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#neatanniversaries
20 years ago this last weekend I finished writing the manuscript of "Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan" & asked the computer to do the wordcount. It was 500,000 words. Plus 130,000 words in the footnotes. 20 years ago!!
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#neatanniversaries
The great John Prine would have become 75 yesterday. I was glad to meet him, backstage at a 1973 concert. He'd been given a copy of the brand-new US edition of my "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan", and said to me: "You put a lot of work into this..."
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#BobDylan
photo by Virginia Turbett I'd never seen before, but seen today on Facebook group The Bob Dylan Fan Club. Backstage at Wembley 1984:
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I don't *pretend* I like it. I didn't like Together Through Life, the Sinatras or Tempest, but I can recognise a major, surprising & complex creation, which Murder Most Foul is - and I can recognise a shallow minor comedian sounding off too.
I love much of Bob Dylan’s work. But I cannot believe anyone is doing anything other then pretending to like his new one-note 17-minute dirge.
#takescover
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I'm posting a few excerpts from "Song and Dance Man" the 50th Anniversary Series, Volumes 1-3, hoping to interest
#BobDylan
enthusiasts who don’t know the book already and remind people who bought it decades ago that it's still alive. Here's one from Vol. 1 on how radio once was:
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"She should have been braver": mea culpa, that was badly phrased. I just meant she should have stuck to the planned Dylan song, and it was the booing I was concerned to deplore. I know she was a brave person: exceptionally so. I'm sorry to have written in haste.
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How can Street Legal NOT be in this list?!
Some banging albums on this list,what a great year 1978 was for fantastic music 😎😎
Artwork Mark Cromack
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#neatanniversaries
Blues queen Victoria Spivey died 45 years ago today. There's a sizeable entry on her in my "
#BobDylan
Encyclopedia". She was an important figure in Dylan's early career, and a photo of the two together appears on the back of the New Morning album:
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Very interesting interview y'day with the widow of Jacques Levy about her friendly relationship with
#BobDylan
, how crucial Levy was to the Rolling Thunder Revues and her shock at Scorsese's excision of him. c/o Ray Padgett's blog
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I head for Switzerland tomorrow, for my first gig since The Troubadour in London 17 months ago. I'll be talking
#BobDylan
with Elliott Murphy & others, just after his band's live set.
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Combining a chunk of an "Is it Rolling, Bob?" podcast interview and some tremendous 1978 footage, the publisher of my "Outtakes On
#BobDylan
" book has made this video about the time Bob asked to meet me:
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The Dutch tested incoming passengers from S. Africa. And an alarming 10% from two flights were positive. The British, of course, did not test. And now - what a surprise - the UK has confirmed cases of the variant.
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Three hurt from jumping off the cliff; how many hurt from crowding together without social distancing in order to gawp at the three & the ambulance?
Three seriously hurt 'jumping off cliff into sea' at Durdle Door
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